This document describes the replication files associated with the following paper:
Hirofumi Miwa. “Assessing the Conservative Nature of the Supreme Court of Japan via Ideal Point Estimation of Justices.” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies.

The following files are contained herein:
1_main_results.R (R code to replicate the analyses, except for those in Appendix A.3)
2_coding_reliability (R code to replicate the analyses in Appendix A.3)
case_data.csv (case information data)
coding_data_1.csv (Coder #1's coding)
coding_data_2.csv (Coder #2's coding)
coding_data_3.csv (Coder #3's coding)
court_opinion_data.csv (pre-coded data of justices' opinions)
justice_data.csv (justices' data)
voting_records.csv (post-coded data of justices' voting behavior)
codebook.pdf (explanation of the above CSV files)
dynamic_list.Rdata (MCMC draws of the dynamic IRT model in the main analysis)
dynamic_list_r.Rdata (MCMC draws of the dynamic IRT model in the robustness check in Appendix C.6)
static_results.Rdata (MCMC draws of the preliminary static IRT model in the main analysis)
static_results_r.Rdata (MCMC draws of the preliminary static IRT model in the robustness check in Appendix C.6)

All R and CSV files are encoded in UTF-8. Files containing Japanese characters may display incorrectly if opened with another encoding.

To replicate the analyses, place the above CSV files in your working directory and run 1_main_results.R and 2_coding_reliability.R. If you want to skip the estimation process via MCMC to save time, please load the Rdata files.

All data analyses in this paper were carried out using R version 4.3.3 and the following packages: doParallel 1.0.17, irr 0.84.1, MCMCpack 1.7-0, mgcv 1.9-1, and stringi 1.8.3. If you do not have these packages, please install them before running the replication code. If your environment does not support parallel computation, modify the parts using foreach() in the doParallel package to ordinary for loops.

If you have any questions or concerns about the files, please contact the author.